As account based marketing (ABM) continues to grow and develop into a powerful marketing strategy, the age-old question remains: How do I prove and measure my results? Don’t let the thought intimidate you, though. Diving into your account based marketing metrics to understand your results is all about asking the right questions.
While some metrics will be the same as those used for measuring inbound marketing strategies, how you use them to answer the questions you really should be asking will vary. Account based marketing metrics focus on quality over quantity.
This means looking at engagement levels over traffic volume, opportunities over leads, and marketing having a close reporting relationship with sales. It also means understanding activity metrics as well as outcome metrics.
Keep reading to learn:
- What areas you should be reviewing for your account based marketing metrics.
- What questions you should be answering to measure your success.
- Why these areas are important for your ABM strategy.
Activity Account Based Marketing Metrics
Activity ABM metrics refer to the results of your pre-sale activities. The goal is to understand the results of your efforts to attract, engage, and influence your targeted audience prior to a sale. There are three primary areas to measure your effectiveness.
Coverage
The intent behind looking at coverage is to measure your penetration level within the accounts you are targeting. This means balancing the potential of each account against your activity performance. Your goal is to answer the following questions:
- What is the size or number of contacts within each account?
- What percentage of those contacts have you connected with?
- How many contacts do you have complete data for?
- How much has your contact list grown within each account?
Knowing who to target has been identified as one of the biggest challenges for ABM marketers. Looking at your coverage account based marketing metrics and asking these questions will help you understand if you are you targeting the right accounts. Moreover, you’ll learn if you are connecting with the right people within those accounts, and whether you are making an impact.
Engagement
Your engagement account based marketing metrics will be the area that most closely mirrors more typical marketing metrics. Your focus is to measure how involved your contacts are with your content and company and what content they are looking at. To understand your engagement level, look at the following areas:
- Email metrics. How is your audience engaging with your email marketing efforts? Like inbound marketing, you will want to know your open and click through rates. However, you should be looking at the number of responses you received from each email and if your messages are being shared by email recipients to others (either inside or outside of your target accounts).
- Social metrics. Have contacts from your targeted accounts liked, shared, or commented on your posts? Are they following your business and professional social accounts?
- Consumption rates. Like email and social, you are looking at how contacts from your targeted accounts are consuming your online content, specifically information on your website and blog. Account based marketing metrics to review are the number of page views, average page time, and what specific content is being viewed and downloaded.
Using a sales and marketing platform like HubSpot can make gaining this information much easier. This article, How to Use HubSpot for Sales explains more.
- Offline activity. Beyond your digital information, track how your targeted accounts are engaging with you offline. Are they attending events you sponsor, readily taking your phone calls, and responding to direct mail?
The primary goal behind these account based marketing metrics is knowing where your contacts are in their buying journey. Knowing this will help you understand whether their questions are being answered and when they are ready for a more detailed conversation with sales. Your metrics can also uncover what information (content) your website may be missing to support contacts in their research.
Influence
Your influence on a targeted account will be measured mostly by your interactions with each contact. However some of your influence will be learned by looking at your engagement account based marketing metrics we mentioned above. The big question here is if your efforts are working. To understand your influence answer these questions:
- What is your conversion rate for contacts in your targeted accounts?
- Where in your marketing funnel are they converting?
- What is your volume and frequency of meetings or calls with each account?
- Who are you having these meetings with? Account influencers? Final decision makers?
- What are the results of your meetings?
Your answers will reveal what efforts are working and where you need to make changes to your approach or the information you provide.
Outcome Account Based Marketing Metrics
Outcome ABM metrics review your post-sale results. The goal is not only to measure the monetary value of each transaction, but also to track your performance and successes over time. This information is also useful to identify new accounts to target.
Value
Measuring value is more than just your total sales volume, although it is part of this ABM metric. The goal is to better understand the worth of each account to your bottom line, how they compare to your other accounts, and the performance of each individual sales rep. Your account based marketing metrics should uncover the following:
- What is your average selling point (ASP) value? This is the price point that your products or services within each category are typically sold.
- What is the value of each deal or transaction?
- What is the cumulative value of each account?
- How much revenue have upsale transactions generated?
- What is the total sales volume per sales rep?
- What is the average account sales volume per rep?
Answers to these questions reveal the most tangible insights into your results as these numbers won’t lie. By looking at individual accounts you can measure where you are growing and where opportunities exist. They will also reveal underperforming accounts.
The value of your sales reps not only reveals your strongest assets, but it’s also a resource of information for newer reps on what works and what doesn’t in your sales process.
Retention
At the beginning I mentioned that account based marketing metrics is about measuring quality over quantity. Retention is one area where this comes into play. Retention not only measures the health of an account, but also their satisfaction level. We refer to this area as delight. Delighted customers stick with you beyond the single transaction. Here are the areas to review:
- How many sales are repeat transactions?
- How many sales are upsale or add-on purchases?
- How many referrals are you getting from your targeted accounts?
- Are these referrals a good fit?
- What is your churn rate? (The percentage of customers or revenue lost during any given time frame.)
- How satisfied are your current customers? Surveys and online reviews are good sources for this information.
Measuring retention is a good indication of the strength of your customer relationships. Accounts that stay with you long-term are generally satisfied customers. Hopefully these are the same ones providing the most value to your business.
Dissatisfied customers won’t stay with you very long and are good indicators of areas you need to change and improve — either with process, products, or account types.
ROI
The most significant of account based marketing metrics is your return on investment (ROI). Ultimately, you are measuring if your campaigns and marketing strategies were effective. At its simplest, ROI is the percentage of your investment to earnings.
What makes this so challenging in reality is the number of factors and influences on each transaction or sale. So take a step back and ask these questions:
- What is your close rate?
- Has your close rate improved over the past month, quarter, or year?
- On average, how long does it take to close a sale?
- How has days to close improved over time?
- What was your return on investment for each campaign you launched?
The purpose behind answering these questions is not just to know what marketing campaigns were successful, but to better understand the overall marketing and sales effectiveness.
Looking at all areas of your account based marketing metrics will reveal where areas of growth, stagnation, and decline exist. Plus they will help you identify and confirm your ideal account types for future marketing efforts.
Do you have questions regarding your account based marketing metrics or strategies? Contact HELLO Marketing for a free 20-minute consultation.